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We’ve all wanted to write that resignation letter—to let the world know the hurt isn’t our fault. Joseph faces that exact urge in Matthew 1, betrayed and confused after he finds out Mary, the woman he is betrothed to, is pregnant — forced to choose between saying his peace and keeping it.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The pastor uses the metaphor of “resignation letters” to describe how we express frustration and pain. How is Joseph’s choice to quietly divorce Mary (rather than publicly shame her) similar to or different from choosing not to “write a resignation letter” in our own lives? What does restraint accomplish spiritually?
The pastor argues that Joseph moves from doing “the good” (quietly divorcing Mary) to doing “the true” (marrying Mary and accepting God’s plan) when the angel appears. What is the difference between these two responses, and how does this distinction apply to our own decisions about following God?
The sermon emphasizes that Joseph never saw the fulfillment of God’s plan in his lifetime—he had to wait and trust without seeing the results. How does this challenge our modern expectation for immediate comfort and resolution? What does it mean to have faith when we cannot see the outcome?
The pastor contrasts chasing “current comfort” (like a limited-edition coffee) with pursuing an “eternal recipe” (lasting fulfillment through following Jesus). In what areas of your life do you find yourself choosing temporary comfort over long-term faithfulness? What would change if you shifted your perspective?
What role does the Holy Spirit play in enabling Joseph (and us) to move from merely doing the “morally good” thing to embracing God’s true calling, even when it involves ongoing unease?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
So here we are, it’s Christmas Eve, which also means that we are nearing the end of the year. Funny how those two things go together, isn’t it? And so for at least some of you, if your job is so kind, it’s reached the end of the year at your job as well. And that means that some people contemplate as they go into Christmas break, whether they want to return when everybody else does. Do we want to go back? Do we like where we are working? Or do we want to put on our wishlist for Christmas, a new job? And so sometimes people decide, maybe I’ll just go ahead and turn in a resignation letter.
Now, you could do that just because you’re stressed. You could do that because you have other obligations that are occupying your time and you decide to retire or something. Or you could do that because you decide, I really do not like my workplace. I was reading a list of bad resignation letters recently, and one of them, I have to give this gentleman credit, he wrote to his company and said, “I need to quit my job.” And you probably wonder why. He said, “You see, when I’m unhappy, I eat a lot. And when I eat a lot, I get really fat. And when I get really fat, I don’t present the image that you want me to present at the company. But working at your company makes me unhappy. And worse than that, when I don’t present the image that you want, well, then you’re going to be unhappy, and you’re going to eat a lot, and you, too, will be fat. Therefore, I quit.” Clearly, this man was not working at the North Pole, so not a good thing he assumed.
Another person decided to be a little creative in the media he used in order to resign. He says, “I have chosen this type of paper, that’s toilet paper if you can’t tell, this paper for my two-week resignation as a symbol of how I feel this company has treated me, and ironically, how it is disposed of is where I feel this company is going.” Sincerely, and whoever shared this online was kind enough to that person to blank out their name. But there are interesting ways that you can choose to leave. Those aren’t even the worst. The question is, should you? And probably, if you want to say a good reference at your next place of employment, the answer would probably be no, you shouldn’t. We know that’s how we’re a good worker. We hold it in, right? We don’t say those things, or we say them, probably not on toilet paper.
But it’s confusing because we feel all these things, and we want to let them out, and we want to deal with them, and we don’t want to wait and see some fulfillment someday that, oh yeah, we do get the job that we like. We want fulfillment right now. It can be that way in following the Lord. Not because he’s a bad employer, and hopefully never because we want to write him on toilet paper, but because in the midst of trying to be faithful, we feel things, and we’re scared of things, and we’re angry about things, and we want to let at least the world know. Even if we’re not angry at God, we’re angry at the world, and we want to let it out. We want to express ourselves. And sometimes not expressing ourselves is even embarrassing.
I think that’s one of the reasons why oftentimes people choose to write bad resignation letters. They want to say, this thing that is bad is not my fault. It’s somebody else’s fault. It’s the management that’s causing me to eat too much. It’s the management that didn’t invest in good enough toilet paper. It’s the management that did this, or that, or the other thing. It’s my co-workers. They’re so obnoxious, and they never do anything that I quit. We want to say these things, and oftentimes in life, as God’s calling us to the particular calling that he’s chosen for us, it’s the same way. We want to say our peace, not keep the peace.
How do we balance that desire with what God actually wants us to do as we come and worship the Prince of Peace tonight? Well, we have a great case study in that in the life of Joseph. And we’re going to look at Joseph tonight, and as we do, let’s pray that God would speak to our hearts and prepare us to be those who are going to carry light out into the world the rest of this Christmas season. Would you pray with me, please?
Lord, we do pray that you would guide us, that you would help us to be men and women that are faithful to you. Lord, when we feel misunderstood, when we feel lost and confused, we’re not sure why the things that it seems like you’re leading us to are going the way they are. Would you help us to have the peace that comes from knowing that you were right there with us? That in our disappointments, well, you’ve been on this earth disappointed too. That in our fears, you walked through the very things we face that frighten. And Lord, that you are the one who conquers even death itself. We pray this in your precious name. Amen.
We’re turning to Matthew chapter 1 tonight, and it’s one of the few places we really get much interaction at all with Joseph. Joseph, for as important as his job is as the stepfather of Jesus, he doesn’t get a lot of time on the stage. And he’s okay with that, at least in the end. I don’t know what went through his head at different moments. We don’t really get enough insight in them to know if he would have been the sort of person that would have said, wait a second here. But we do know how he handled himself, and I think that’s very, very important.
Let’s go ahead and turn to Matthew chapter 1 verse 18 tonight. Matthew writes, “Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph before they came together, she was found to be with child in the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly.”
We talked a little bit about Mary’s side of this the other night. So here it is, Mary encounters the angel Gabriel. Gabriel says, “You’re going to have a child. You’re not married yet, I know that, but through the power of the Holy Spirit you are going to give birth to a child, and he’s gonna be the Savior of the world, and he’s going to be the heir of David, and this is going to be what everyone has been hoping for forever.” And then Mary has to go and tell Joseph. Now here’s where we move into Joseph’s side, because Joseph, probably you imagine him in his carpentry shop, he’s planing away at some wood, and Mary approaches him and thinks, well this is odd that Mary’s coming by in the middle of the day. She seems a little upset, and she says, “Joseph, I need to talk to you about something.” Mary outlines what’s happened, and Joseph thinks, I’ve heard some stories in my life. I’ve heard some really incredible stories. I’ve gone fishing with my friends, I’ve heard some stories, but this one tops them all.
And worst of all, Mary, not only will you not just fess up to the fact that you have been unfaithful to your promise to me, worst of all, you’re invoking God in this. I have to think that’s what ran through Joseph’s head, and maybe what came out of his mouth in that moment. We’re not let into that conversation. What we are let into is Joseph’s thought process afterwards. Joseph hears this, and he surely feels betrayed, he surely feels brokenhearted, he’s engaged to be married to Mary. And again, we talked about that the other night, but it bears repeating. Engagement here is umpteen times more serious than it is today. They actually would have to be divorced, as it says, in order to end it.
And so Joseph, he has his life planned out, it’s all moving along, and Mary comes in with this news. And I have to think, because Joseph’s a human being, the first thing Joseph thinks is, Mary has done something horrible, and I know the law says what can be done to someone who’s done that, she can be put to death, and boy would I like to see that right now. He may never have said that, but he was a human being, and he was hurting. And when we’re human beings and we’re hurting, we think all kinds of horrible things, and in this case, Joseph could have even felt justified in it. It’s exactly what God’s law said could happen.
And here’s the problem for Joseph. There’s another level to this. He’s hurting, but once the community realizes what’s going on with Mary, that she’s expecting a child, and they start to notice that she’s expecting a child, they’re going to look at Joseph and squint at him and wonder what he has to do with this. And whatever conclusion they come to isn’t going to look good for Joseph. They assume that he isn’t the father of the child. Well, it looks like Mary betrayed him, and that makes him look like a fool.
If they assume that he is the father, then it looks like Joseph is someone who isn’t faithful to what God’s called him, to how he’s called him to live, and he looks like a horrible sinner. What’s he going to do? I think this is the context where we often write those letters, and maybe Joseph, if he’d had toilet paper in that time period, would have wanted to write what he was thinking to Mary on a piece of toilet paper. Because Joseph had to be feeling a lot of emotion. And if we ever feel like we’re betrayed, if we ever feel like we’re hurt, if we ever just feel like we’ve been hit by a train and we don’t know what to do with it, Joseph would be saying, yes, I know that feeling.
So what’s he going to do? He’s feeling that. He knows what’s coming next from the community. Does he want to somehow deal with it? And indeed, if he’d invoked what the law permitted him to do, if he’d said, okay Mary, it’s time for you to get what’s coming for you, we’re gonna call you out into the community, we’re going to humiliate you, and if it happens to suit the mood of the crowd, we’re gonna stone you to death. Well, he could have let out his aggression, his pain, his agony, and on top of that, at least the community would say, well Joseph, you know, Mary may not have been faithful to her promise to you, but at least you’re decisive. At least you are a righteous man standing up for the law. At least there’s that.
And while that sounds harsh to us today, it would have been a way for Joseph to defend his honor. So he could have done that. And this isn’t something that Joseph would have been unaware of. It’s not like we’re speculating on things that Joseph never thought of. Whether or not he ever got close to doing that, the simple fact is Joseph would have known he could have done that. So what was he going to do?
Well, we’re told here, sometimes we kind of cringe when we read it, because we think, Joseph, you’re missing the promise that’s going on. But for Joseph in this setting, he does the most kind thing that he probably can think he could possibly do, which is say, okay Mary, I don’t know what happened with you. I’m awfully disappointed, but I don’t want to, I certainly don’t want to bring death upon you, and I don’t even want to make this any worse for you than it already is going to be, because it’s going to be awful. I’m just going to quietly divorce you. We’ll go our own separate ways. I wish things would have been different, but they are what they are, and I wish it could have been different. And that seems to be exactly the attitude that Joseph took.
He could have written that resignation letter. He could have got his feelings out. He could have felt the feels. He could have just said, this is what I know. This is my truth, and I’m going to let the world know about it. But Joseph instead says, I want to do more than that. So often we’re so busy trying to think about how to make ourselves look good, that we lose sight of making God look good. But while we look at this and think, oh Joseph, you’re divorcing Mary over this. This is sad. This is horrible. In the moment, he’s trying to do the most God-honoring thing he can think to do. At least he’s not going to exact the revenge he deserves. He knows what God has said. Vengeance is mine, says the Lord. He’s not going to demand even what the law says he can do.
How often today we say, well this is my right. Joseph had rights here. He’s not going to take them. And in that, he’s setting up a platform, a place that God’s going to plant more seeds, that God’s going to work. But so often as we’re thinking about how to defend our own rights and how to look good in this world, we’re too busy to notice that, the opportunity to testify to God and his mercy.
Think about today, how much we talk about influencers. It used to be, if you were a bit more on the geeky side, I’m a geek, you know, you’re interested in all the stuff happening online. But nowadays, influencers, they end up on the news, they end up, I just saw one of the big tech influencers doing commercials on a major network the other night. I mean, we’ve kind of gotten to the point where these people on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram, we pay a great, great deal of attention to.
And the interesting thing when you think about that is, what do they do? They spend a great deal of their time trying to look good oftentimes. And that could be in all kinds of traditional ways, right? They might, as they get more important, they might hire a person to make sure that they’re all ready to be up on stage, put the right makeup on them or the right hairdo or whatever. But then also, there’s all this stuff behind the scenes. They’re putting up big studios with big studio lights and fancy sound systems and doing all this where it looks like when you’re watching YouTube that you’re sitting in this little place in their home. It’s all nice and cozy. But if you pull the camera out, well, it’s just a fake wall, just like in Hollywood. And it’s not really a cozy place. There’s these giant, painfully hot lights shining down upon them. And there’s boom mics hanging over them and stuff. It’s all about looking and sounding good, not actually being good.
And then you find out, well, this person sounds so savvy as he or she answers things online. And you realize, wait, there’s eight staff people working for this person coming up with these answers. And actually, this person is really quite cruel to them, even. And it’s all an appearance. That’s what we allow to influence us. And then we go and try to do the same. We try to put on the appearance. And if Joseph had demanded his rights, he would have been putting on a really appropriate for the time appearance. And of course, God’s plan wouldn’t have been thwarted. He wouldn’t have let anything happen to Mary. He was going to see this through. But of course, God in his wisdom also knew that Joseph wouldn’t do that. I believe it was God’s spirit working in Joseph that enabled him not to do that.
Because Joseph is not acting like we act when we’ve been brutalized. Joseph was acting as one being led by God. And so there’s a step here as he chooses not to utterly ruin Mary that shows him moving. Okay, he’s not going to go with the comfortable of caring about what society thinks and being the influencer cabinet maker of Palestine. No, he’s not going to do that. One step, and this is the one where we’d often pat ourselves on the back and call it a day, is say, okay, I’m going to stand with Mary. I’m going to not be comfortable. I’m going to do what’s good. Take a look at verse 20.
Joseph’s being stretched here. He’s made this choice. Okay, I’m going to just divorce Mary. And then an angel shows up to him in a dream. And isn’t it inconvenient? He’s already gone above and beyond. He’s already done this thing that you wouldn’t think someone would need to do, and certainly no one could have faulted him for not doing. And now the angel says, you need to go ahead and marry Mary.
And I wonder, as Joseph’s having this dream, does he react? Sometimes we just kind of are taking in dreams, but sometimes we kind of feel things in the middle of it, and you wake up, and your heart’s pounding, and you think, boy, that was a horrible dream, and I was just trying to stop it, and I couldn’t scream. And, you know, was that a little bit of it? What more do you want from me? Joseph’s already refrained from humiliating Mary, but then he’s told there’s more going on.
Mary couldn’t help but know that more is going on. There’s no way that she’s going to miss the fact that there’s more going on, but Joseph, he’s just trying to make sense of what he can. He’s just peering into this thing that’s happening, and in some sense, as I was thinking about this, Joseph’s really the first witness to what’s happening with Jesus. Because Mary is right in the thick of the action, but Joseph’s the first one standing at the sidelines, looking in and saying, how do I make sense of this? What does this mean? What in the world is going on here? My life feels like it’s coming apart, and having to decide what am I going to do with that?
It’s what we all need to think about as we encounter Jesus, because he’s going to call us into uncomfortable places, not just into the comfortable, socially acceptable observance of Christmas. We put up lights and have nice dinners and parties for weeks on end, and we get in trouble like that guy that was unhappy at his job because we’re eating so much, and not necessarily because we’re unhappy, but because we’re having just such a great time. It’s so good.
What are we going to do when that sort of observation of something quasi-religious that our society says is okay ends, and then we have to decide, am I going to walk with Jesus when it actually is embarrassing, when it’s actually knocking down the lights and taking down the photo filters, and people just seeing me and following Jesus, and then society’s going to start pointing at me? What are we going to do then? Are we willing to wait as the Lord works, and there’s that discomfort? Are we willing to sit in the discomfort? Are we willing to take blows from the society as Joseph was going to do here and say, I don’t deserve this? And we can get super theological and say, well, we all deserve the worst that could possibly come to us, but at least from a human standpoint, we don’t deserve it, and yet, what are we going to do?
And when we get to that point, we say, what am I going to do? We can move beyond just doing the morally extra good thing and starting to accept the role that God is really calling us to. Joseph is going to be called to do something more, not by his own power, but by the work of the Spirit in him. That’s going to be to move from the good to the true, not just to not humiliate Mary, not even just to marry Mary, but to recognize genuinely this is what God is doing, and yes, it’s going to be uncomfortable, and yes, I’m going to have to hold my tongue a lot of the time because people are going to look, and they’re going to point, and I’m going to feel humiliated, and that’s okay because God’s working.
Verse 22.
What does Matthew go on and say about this? He says, “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which means God with us.”
Joseph’s going to be the first witness which is going to be uncomfortable, but Joseph’s also going to be the first witness which is going to be incredible. Outside of Mary, who’s the first human being to ever see God in the flesh? Joseph. He’s there in the manger scene, right? We know the scene, we depict it, not always perfectly accurately. The wise men aren’t there yet, but Joseph’s there.
It would have been so easy to walk away, or worse. But as the Spirit enables Joseph to do this, what does he get to do? He gets to see God breaking into this world with salvation. And I think he’s in that smelly, dirty, dark, damp, uncomfortable scene. Not the beautiful gilded nativity, but the real life barn. A grotto, a little cave, maybe with animals in it as it’s all going on.
Joseph looks and he realizes, wow, look what’s happening, look what’s going on here. Am I willing to be in line with God when it’s that uncomfortable, so that I can see the beauty of what God’s doing? Because it is going to be uncomfortable. Christmas isn’t about comfort, not in that sense. You might sing of comfort and joy, and certainly in the ultimate, eternal sense, it’s there. But Christmas is about God calling people to respond to a kingdom that is often very, very uncomfortable in the moment to follow.
It depends what we’re valuing. It doesn’t make everything easy when we do it. We have no reason to believe it was ever easy for Joseph. We don’t have any reason to believe even 10 or 20 years later that suddenly everything was comfortable and rosy again. It very well could have stayed uncomfortable all his life. It might to an extent in today’s society, but certainly in that society they didn’t forget things and they weren’t going to overlook things. And so Joseph probably lived an uncomfortable life.
And by everything that we can see in scripture, it would appear that by the time Jesus even began his earthly ministry, much less went to the cross for us and died and triumphed over death and the resurrection, by that time Joseph was dead. Joseph didn’t get to see the fulfillment. He just had to wait and hold on. It’d be so much easier not to. Joseph could have picked an easier life. He could have said, I’ll just divorce Mary. I know I had this dream. It probably was something I ate last night. I don’t need to think about it anymore. I’m just going to move on, forget about it, and live a normal life. And it might have been easier. But he wouldn’t have gotten to be a part of God’s plan there. He wouldn’t have gotten to experience the beauty of what was happening at Christmas.
And I believe as we encounter this scene, what God is calling us to be confronted by is, are we willing to come to the uncomfortableness of Christmas and to wait there? Are we looking for the easy thing we can rejoice in because it’s all done right now? I love Christmas coffee. That’s one of the things that I find comforting at Christmas. One of the things that’s fun is most of the big makers of different flavors of coffee or different blends of coffee, well, they come out with their Christmas blends, right? And you can go and buy them at the store. And I like to stock up on them for the year because they’re going to go away and they’re wonderful.
Well, a few years ago, Duncan had just an absolutely amazing one called Cinnamon Nutmeg. It’s really, really, really good. I mean, this is good coffee. I’m not a big flavored coffee person. But what I like about it, it’s not sweet. It’s just this right combination of a really good coffee bean with a few spices. It tastes like Christmas. I mean, it is wonderful. And it’s unfortunate I’m telling you about this because if I just made you want a cup of it, they don’t make it any longer. And that’s one thing I don’t like about buying something like that because it’s wonderful but it’s a limited edition. And then too often, especially the ones I really like, they keep bringing back peppermint even though I have that infernal abomination. I don’t know why they ruin coffee with that. But they don’t bring back Cinnamon Nutmeg. And it seems like when I find one of those, what do they do? They get rid of it.
It’s so easy to just go and they made it in K-cups. You can stick it into a Keurig and a minute later you have this delicious cup of coffee. But even before I realized it was not coming back, I started to experiment with could I get the right combination of nutmeg and cinnamon in coffee so that I could actually replicate it. That way I wouldn’t have to depend on making sure that they bring it back the next year. I can’t provide the recipe because I haven’t succeeded yet. And I’ve had a fair number of really bad cups of coffee in my attempts because nutmeg is a hard spice to work with. I’ve not succeeded yet.
But why even bother? Well, because I want to do the more uncomfortable thing that allows me to get something that lasts. Because if I ever crack that code, if I figure that out, I’m going to have Cinnamon Nutmeg coffee for the rest of my life and that’s going to be a great thing.
When we chase after current comfort, when we say, I’ll do the culturally acceptable Christmas, but don’t push me into something beyond that. I don’t mind singing some songs about Jesus, but actually going into the year and carrying it on, that’s too hard, that’s painful. And even for many of us who are really committed at times, we kind of think, but can I just back off a little bit because it’s hard. Sort of like us grabbing that K-cup, we grab the Christmas K-cup and we put it into our life Keurig and it comes out a decent cup of life for a little bit. But it’s not a recipe that lasts. It’s a limited edition.
For some of us it might last 80 years or 90 years or 100 years. For some of us it might last 20 years or 10. Funny thing is, we don’t know. But the sale will end. And the question is, are we going to go for the less comfortable thing in the moment that’s the recipe for a much more delicious eternal life? Not as easy. Sometimes outright disquieting. But in that disquieting place we encounter something incredibly beautiful. The Savior that came into it with us. He doesn’t ask us to go there on our own.
He didn’t ask Joseph to be a stepfather and to go into this place and to suffer and not to even see it fulfilled in his lifetime and just be miserable. He didn’t ask that. He said, I’m coming into this world so Joseph and everyone else, including each and every person in this room, could turn to me and experience a recipe that won’t ever go out of season. A recipe that will last. And that’s where we find Jesus in this season.
When we look at that manger. When we look at Mary and Joseph waiting to see it all play out. We realize that a lot of times now we’re still waiting to see it all play out and we want to send that resignation letter. We want to complain. We want to let everyone know how we really feel. And God says, just follow me. You don’t have to make it all right right now. Because I’m going to make it all right forever.
God’s comfort is in the good and the true to go and not demand what’s our right. Not to demand what will make us look good but what is pleasing to God and to chase after God’s truth and to do that not expecting everything to be comfortable right away but to know that he gives us a comfort that will always last.
So if you come here tonight and you’re not feeling comfortable and you’re feeling like there’s the weight of the world on you, it’s not that you’ve gotten the wrong recipe. God’s brewing up something amazing and it’s coming. And in this time where we celebrate the Christmas that has happened and wait for the second advent that has not yet come, may we choose to follow him. May we turn to him and may by his grace he give us the strength to follow him and to show that love to the world.
Because in the thing that is apparently, not apparently comfortable, in the thing that looks downright uncomfortable, we find the ultimate comfort. The comfort of Jesus. Would you pray with me?
Lord we do come before you as those we want comfort, we want peace. Would you help us hold on to you because we find momentary peace. We can speak our minds. We can try to right things by our own strength. We can demand what we deserve and it may actually be more comfortable for a time.
We can see that in the life of Joseph, the life of Mary, in the life of the faithful throughout the ages. But as you call us, you don’t call us to that. You call us to an eternal recipe. Would you give us the strength to trust in it? Would you give us the strength to repeatedly come to you and lay before you those places where we stray from it? By the power of your spirit would you strengthen us that we would hold fast to you in all the disquieting moments knowing that you are doing something amazing and good and true. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.
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